Regional map of the Middle East showing the location of Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and their surrounding countries. Breakdown of the jurisdictional divisions resulting from the negotiations of the 1995 Oslo Interim Accords.

Back and forth manipulations and blurring of the boundary line differentiating Israeli and Palestinian areas of control as a result of Palestinian construction and Israeli demolition of properties along the boundary’s periphery. Palestinian construction which extends beyond the Area C boundary and is not demolished de-facto ‘stretches’ that line outward, redefining it. Whereas, properties which are demolished contract the boundary backward to its original position.

Project rendering showing how new ecologies emerge around the site of a house demolition being used for sewage management. Plants and debris serve as remediating agents, filtering the wastewater and turning it into a source for animal fodder agricultural irrigation.

Project rendering showing how new ecologies emerge around the site of a house demolition being used for sewage management. Plants and debris serve as remediating agents, filtering the wastewater and turning it into a source for animal fodder agricultural irrigation.
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GROUND UP: Is the student journal of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley is an annual print and web publication intended to stimulate thought, discussion, visual exploration and substantive speculation about emerging landscape issues affecting contemporary praxis. IS an examination of a critical theme arising from the tension between contemporary landscape architecture, ecology and pressing cultural issues. IS intended as a discursive platform to explore concepts grounded in local issues with global relevance.

Project Narrative

Grit is from the ground, abrasive and coarse. Grit erodes and accrues. Like sandpaper, grit refines. Like the grain of sand that creates a pearl, grit is an agitator and a catalyst.

The inaugural issue of GROUND UP peered into Landscapes of Uncertainty, examining who and what defines the next move in landscape architecture. This second edition asks how our field fulfills its potential by exploring grit as a quality, texture and approach for negotiating change in our landscapes. Shifts in climate and society call for responses and interventions grounded in courage and creative resolve.

How we each take up this call is as diverse as the fingerprints on these pages. For our team, grit was born of the dialectic between the desire to create critically acclaimed landscape architecture and the necessity to cultivate intact ecosystems and spatial justice. Your submissions expanded grit's meaning, introducing implications, actions and inventions well beyond our original query. As Walter Hood tells it, grit is the stuff of dreams. Through Brett Milligan's microscope and macroscope, grit is the sediment casualty, the matter moved. For Iran's Baha'i religious minority, grit is defiance of human rights violations.

From your expanded definitions of grit, the narrative arc of the journal emerged as a journey of design- operable at multiple scales- moving from the process of a single project, to the lifetime of a designer, to the ontological evolution of the design discipline. Abutting the limits of print, the journal expresses the iterative, cyclical, blended nature of process in a static framework. The dialogue evolves over four units: